Page 66 of First Comes Marriage

He hooked one of her legs over his hip and captured her nipple between her teeth, tugging gently until she melted back against the glass behind her. Lifting his mouth back to hers, he lined himself up with her entrance, pressing against her.

“You want me to fuck you here, baby? Like this? Where anyone out on the bay tonight could look up at this window and see what a good wife you are?” She sucked in a shocked breath, but her hips rocketed forward and he slid inside her—not all the way, but enough for them both to groan in relief. “Fuck, you’re tight like this.”

He dropped one hand between them, stroking her clit in those rough little circles she liked until she relaxed around him and he could push another inch inside.

“Sebastian,” she whined, watching the place where he disappeared inside her in disbelief.

“You can take it.” As if to prove his point, he pushed forwardagain, her gasp setting off a riot of warmth blossoming in his chest. “I’m going to make it so good for you,” he promised, pressing his forehead to hers as he slid the rest of the way into the hot clutch of her.

“I know you will,” she said.

And fuck if that trust didn’t lash against his skin, stinging and sharp, and yet he wanted more despite the burn. He pulled almost all the way out and thrust back in, her surprised inhale urging him on to do it again and again, tilting his hips until he was sure his piercing teased at the right spot. Her hands were everywhere—in his hair and scraping over his back, digging into his ass and pulling him into her over and over, and still he wanted to be closer, to slow down and feel each slide of his skin over hers, each spark along his nerves, to speed up and lose himself in the inexorable rhythm of their coupling.

“Why?” he whispered against her lips. He wasn’t sure what exactly he meant—why are you letting me be with you like this? Why did you come back? Why didn’t I know it could be like this, why didn’t you find me sooner, why do you have to go? Why does it feel like I’m being unmade and remade all at once?

She laced her fingers with his and guided his hand from where it had been toying with her nipple to press against the tattoo on her side, their fingertips brushing the bottom curve of her breast. As she held his palm to the ink on her skin, she stared into his eyes, as though inviting him to read the answers there if only he would look hard enough. But all he saw were more questions—his own mingling with hers and tangling into this knot of doubt that urged him to fuck her harder, faster, to race against that distant ticking clock taunting them.

She cried out his name as she came, her inner walls clutching at him with each frantic thrust until he joined her with a roar, the pleasure racing down his spine and tearing him open. It was too good, too bright. His cock jolted within her, and he tried to get closer, deeper, to fuse himself with her in wayshe didn’t understand. He wanted to keep her like this—face frozen in pleasure, his name on her lips, her body pulling him in—until they both forgot all about anything other than this, this perfect moment, this pure bliss where there was no time and she was his.

As the pleasure receded, she dropped her forehead to his chest, the aftershocks of her orgasm fluttering around his softening cock. He dropped a kiss to the sweaty mess of her hair, then reluctantly pulled away to dispose of the condom. He returned to the living room to find her exactly as he’d left her, slumped against the glass with a hazy look on her face that mimicked the tentative satisfaction in his own chest.

He took her hand and led her to his bedroom, leaving their clothing scattered about the living room. He tucked her into his bed and pulled her into his arms as if he could calm the panic clawing up his throat if he held her tight enough. And if, half-awake in the night, he slid into her from behind and held her against his chest so he could feel her shake in his arms when she came, if he slept tangled between her legs with his lips pressed to her tattoo, it was only to calm that restlessness he still didn’t understand.

Chapter twenty-four

Sabrina pressed the foot pedal and the pottery wheel whirred to life. She hadn’t intended to throw on the wheel today, but after the night before, after waking up alone with a hastily scribbled note that Sebastian had gone into work early, she had to dosomething. She could not spend the entire day in the condo she’d begun to think of as theirs with nothing to do but replay the hottest night of her life with a man who couldn’t have gotten away from her faster this morning if he’d tried. She’d arrived at the studio intending to hang the vinyl letters on the window that would announce to Aster Bay that Get Clayed was open and ready for business, but she knew there was only one thing that steadied her when she was feeling shaken up like this.

She worked the clay, drawing it up and flattening it out in an endless cycle. It had been too long since she’d had her hands in the clay, the greyish brown coating her skin in familiar ways, the hum of the wheel, the rhythm of the clay taking shape and dissolving back into shapelessness. The movements became meditative, but even this, even the place she felt most herself, wasn’t enough to calm the voices in her head.

You will not read into anything that happened last night. Or this morning. You will not confuse oxytocin and dopamine andwhatever other feel-good sex chemicals for actual feelings.

Her hands moved of their own accord as she tried to convince herself that nothing had changed. It was a trick of biology, an evolutionary impulse that had long outlived its usefulness. She was confusing friendship and lust for other things she didn’t dare name, emotions that left her vulnerable and ripe for heartbreak. She’d had quite enough of that already, thank you very much.

And there was that other pesky piece of the puzzle to consider. If there were actual feelings involved, if the way he’d looked at her when he’d pulled her close in the middle of the night for rounds two and three was about something other than hormones and proximity, then she’d have to face all the ways she’d fucked up yet again. All the ways she wasn’t going to be enough for him.Like you weren’t enough for Jordan.

She froze at the thought and in that moment of hesitation, her clay became uncentered, the fragile walls she’d been building crumbling in dramatic fashion into a heap of mutilated clay on the wheel. The wheel slowed to a stop and she cursed under her breath, using the heel of her hand to move a loose wisp of hair off her forehead.

Of course, Sebastian chose that moment to appear, as if summoned by her incessant thoughts about the ways he used his fingers and tongue and cock—

“What’s that look about?” Sebastian asked with a knowing twitch of his lip as he rounded the worktable at the front of the studio and made his way to Sabrina where she sat at the wheel.

She blinked, shaking her head and starting up the wheel again. “Nothing. I’m trying to get back in the habit. For Kyla’s friend’s party.”

“The penis party,” he said casually as he leaned against the worktable.

“The break-up party.”

She gathered the clay back together in the center of her wheeland started working it again. If she focused on the clay then she couldn’t notice how out of place he looked in his three-piece suit in her studio, nor could she notice how that thought stung, how much she wanted him to fit here with her. But Sebastian fit with the Sabrina that wore silk blouses and pencil skirts, not the Sabrina who wore leggings and an oversized t-shirt knotted up at her waist, hands coated in clay.

“I thought you’d done these a hundred times before.”

“I have. But Kyla wants…something different.” The messages she’d woken to from Kyla that morning had been enthusiastic, bursting with excitement for the two-evening party she was hosting for her friend. And they’d contained a very specific request, courtesy of Tessa.

“She doesn’t want to smash a clay dick?” he asked.

“She does. But she also wants to make a second piece. One she can keep.” Heat rushed to her cheeks, which was stupid considering she’d had Sebastian’spieceinside her repeatedly the night before.

“Will you show me?”

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